Beyond Money I: «Good» Money

Every wish and attempt to think “beyond money” runs into one immense difficulty: that all of our thoughts are already calibrated in money. We know the world so much shaped only through money, the forms it forces on everything are so infinitely familiar to us, they are so powerful and from a young age we were all pushed so emphatically to make them our own, that it is almost as impossible for our thinking to imagine a world beyond money as it is a world beyond space and time. Any intellectual game with X parallel universes is apparently childs’ play compared with what’s needed to think about the concept of just one world existing without money.

Most people worry about money

From the outset, that leads thereto that thoughts about how it could go otherwise in most cases don't go further than to money itself: most people worry about money. The triggers are the crises that money regularly gets into and which are currently more severe and have longer lasting effect than usual. Criticism of monetary conditions stemming from crises at most dare to wish that money would function properly, crisis-free. Everything would already be fine if only the banks were better controlled, the right financial transactions taxed, or the appropriate people fired. Or alternatively: if the people would buy less or buy the right things in the right stores from the right countries and at the right prices.

In regional currencies money actually functions differently than the money in force

Others try to overcome the fact that things are not working so well with money by depicting a money according to their wishes, a money that sheds certain bad characteristics and retains only the good ones. There the appropriate tax should do the job, a proclaimed abolition of interest rates or the cunningly ingenious disruption of speculative gains. However, they commonly miss that this money, which they thus optimize intellectually, is part of a system whose validity they advance intact. And this system can by no means work with – for example – decelerating gains.

The multiple already-realized attempts to create «another» money reach a bit further. In regional currencies money actually functions differently than the money in force. Barter exchanges use something like working hours as a currency, and starting thus, even though they don't give up thinking in equivalencies, they do eliminate profit interests. And to free people from necessity to battle for the money they need to survive, there is this idea for a while now of an unconditional basic income – albeit in money. And that would mean further dependence on the monetary system and its ways of functioning.